Terms of Address
The images accompanying this piece are taken from Café Art’s MyLondon project, an annual scheme that distributes 100 Fujifilm Quicksnap film cameras to people who have experienced homelessness to take photographs from around the city. These photographs are sold as calendars and greetings cards, with profits going to the artists. Café Art is now setting up a charity called MyWorld that supports other cities to establish similar schemes. Featured here is Hands In, Liverpool Street by Amadeus Xavier Quadeer (2017).
What is an address? An address is a place. The location of your front door and the rooms behind it. Markers of addresses are visible on the surfaces of a city or town: signs declare the names of streets in graphic identities that distinguish between local authorities and local identities. Front doors frame the numbers they display as public declarations of fact. This is number 62; here is 16b; you are on Knatchbull Road. I’m fond of the crystallising moment when an address becomes a place – the result of a search on Google Maps, stepping off a bus or turning a corner to come face-to-face with, hopefully, the right location. Yes, this is the place: the Xi’an Impression restaurant or the Italian embassy or Jenny’s new flat.
An address is also a code – that list of data that allowed you to get to Xi’an Impression to begin with. These locators care little about the font of the road sign, or the quality of the noodles, or the length of the queue outside. An address reveals near to nothing about a place’s architecture, the purpose of a building, or its symbolism. 1,600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Northwest, Washington, DC; 43 De Beauvoir Road, London, N1 5SF; 280 Boulevard Michelet, 13008 Marseille; Hauptstraße 155, 10827 Berlin. You can look these addresses up and read some social, political or architectural significance in them. Or you – and more importantly the bureaucratic systems they are ultimately designed for – can see them as data points on a database that need not refer to geographic location at all.
Large Stick by Allisa Christie (2018).
Because an address is, perhaps most importantly, an identity. Your address will likely be registered with your employer, bank, utility supplier, phone company, internet provider, insurance supplier, local library and many others, painting a fairly comprehensive picture of your life. Yet, more often than not, the address is used to verify that you are who you say you are, rather than where you say you are; it confirms your identity, rather than your location.
This is partly because correspondence between administrative services and individuals can be carried out digitally. However, this isn’t merely a modern phenomenon. Early uses of addresses also hint at the importance of identity over mere location. Deirdre Mask, author of The Address Book, notes the case of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, whose “description of souls” was ordered in 1753. This census involved one of the earliest examples of the numbering of homes; Maria Theresa’s aim, however, was not to catalogue the built environment but rather to conscript soldiers from across Habsburg dominions. As only some people were eligible to be soldiers, only some people received an address. “Lacking an address became a badge of inferiority,” Mask wrote in The New York Times, adding that the Empress “only cursorily considered Jews and women in her house numbering campaign; animals, so much more useful in war, received more attention.”
Picnic, Crystal Palace by James Robson (2015).
The Enlightenment and subsequent modernisation through the 19th and 20th centuries saw an ongoing process of rationalising and describing contemporary cities and societies, whereby individuals and objects came to be accounted for and understood within their complex ecosystems. Addresses continued to be central to this process, particularly as postal systems became more accurate and efficient. In 1708, Prescot Street in Whitechapel was reported as one of the first roads in the city to have houses distinguished by number rather than sign. One hundred and fifty years later, London was first split into postal districts and, 100 years after that, in mid-century Norwich, the first postcodes were introduced on a trial basis. Today, in its official advice on checking someone’s identity, the UK government describes a “claimed identity” as “a combination of information (often a name, date of birth and address) that represents the attributes of whoever a person is claiming to be.” But if an address is an attribute central to an individual’s identity, what happens if you lose yours?
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Like the Tube map or a zipper, ProxyAddress is one of those rare design phenomena that appears so quietly effective that it doesn’t seem to have been “designed” at all – more discovered. As suggested by its name, ProxyAddress is a system that allows an address to be used as a stand-in or substitute for the real thing. More specifically, ProxyAddress is designed to assist people experiencing homelessness and, with it, the loss of the social legibility that comes with having a fixed address. When the programme is running, an individual can apply for a ProxyAddress through their local council and receive the address of a real, empty property (not the property itself).[1]
Margaret, Islington by Alex Davies (2014).
While it doesn’t immediately solve the problem of homelessness, a ProxyAddress gives the recipient the ability to use the address in all the ways they would if they lived there: to receive post redirected to a PO Box, apply for a job, open a bank account, maintain a phone contract and access a range of social supports that can provide a route into permanent accommodation.
Hildrey graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture in 2009, when the number of people sleeping rough in England was less than half of what it is today. His early career suggested a conventional route through the upper echelons of global starchitectled practices, with stints at Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects and OMA under Rem Koolhaas (“The only bonafide genius I’ve ever been in a room with”). An unlikely student design project for a smoking room at a private member’s club, however, hinted at a slightly different trajectory.
St Paul’s Cathedral by Wes Pearcey (2018).
“The smoking ban had just come in and I was kind of fascinated with that,” says Hildrey. “There were all these grey areas within the legislation about how if a bus stop had three walls you couldn’t smoke in it, but if it had only two then you could,” he explains. Hildrey’s design consisted of a woven structure based on a Menger sponge – a theoretical shape with infinite surface area but zero volume – that, crucially, would allow members to smoke indoors without breaking the new law. Hearing Hildrey explain it, his smoking room project illustrates an early knack for applying architectural thinking to legislative problems, although he understands it differently:
“The only reason I mention it, is that it started me looking at the ridiculous opulence that you sometimes come up against in architecture,” he says. “Then, as the credit crunch hit, you saw society really shift. You had libraries being closed down, parkland being sold off, public toilets shut down and, obviously, homelessness increasing. That was when it started to hit me that, as an architect, I wanted to be doing something to influence the built environment.”
Grand Union Canal by Keith Norris (2018).
The opportunity came in 2017 with a place as a Designer in Residence at London’s Design Museum. The residency programme gives emerging designers funding, a studio space and time to pursue a self-initiated project. Hildrey entered the programme with the intention of using his architectural skills to respond to the impacts of government austerity through outcomes other than buildings. He quickly settled on homelessness. “It was by far the most urgent issue,” he says. “I couldn’t, in good conscience, choose another.”
In the dozens of presentations that Hildrey has given on ProxyAddress since the residency, he often shows a graphic that looks like a diagram of a circuit board. Instead of diodes and transistors, the dizzying lines on the screen run between all the nodes of the social system that an address touches: birth certificate; employment; bank account; driving licence; marriage certificate; universal credit; and more. “The impact of the address snakes out to all these different sectors, and the sectors rarely talk to each other,” he explains.
Perfect Light, Brixton by Peter Nathan (2019).
In his research, Hildrey joined the dots between these nodes by speaking to “as many people as I could”, including those experiencing homelessness, reached through a shelter in Clapham, as well as frontline charity staff, policymakers, regulators, people working in finance, anti-fraud, and the Department for Work and Pensions. “I became a wanderer,” he says, “trying to find out as much about each little enclave of the world as I could.” Part of ProxyAddress’s USP is its ability to mask the interrelations of interdependent and often alienating bureaucracy behind the seeming straightforwardness of an address – a fact that reflects a clear-minded question at the heart of Hildrey’s work: “Does what we’re doing change things for people who are living through homelessness?”
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The first to receive ProxyAddresses were a group of 49 people who took part in a trial with Lewisham Council starting in late-2020. The participants were chosen for their varied backgrounds and different experiences of homelessness: people who were about to be made homeless; people who had been living in a shelter for a year or so; care leavers; prison leavers; ex-armed forces; people escaping domestic violence; and some people more entrenched in homelessness. People with particularly complex needs, such as extreme substance abuse or mental health issues, were not considered.[2] By the end of the trial, a series of staggered six-month periods that concluded in 2022, 47 of the 49 were no longer homeless.
Past and Future, City of London by Ioanna Zakana (2015).
The ProxyAddress pilot success came as a surprise even to Hildrey, who had hoped some 25-30 per cent of the participants might no longer be homeless by its conclusion. Beyond the impact implied in the trial’s quantitative data, individual cases revealed different ways a fixed address could benefit a person. “There was one guy who had been in a shelter for a couple of years and just couldn’t escape it applying for jobs using the care-of address,” says Hildrey. “He got a ProxyAddress, got a job, got a bank account and not only was he able to ultimately move into his own privately rented flat, but he got promoted twice. When I met him for his assessment he drove from his flat to come and meet me. He’s now a regional sales director of a company.”
Another participant in the trial who was escaping from domestic violence described the ProxyAddress as being like a “VPN in the real world”. In her case, the address not only provided a continuous method of contact in the progression from shelter, through monitored accommodation, to a privately rented home, but the separation of the ProxyAddress from a real location also provided the vital element of anonymity for a person at risk. As Hildrey explains, “If you’ve been through a situation where the one person you’re supposed to trust has abused you, then any level of trust is hard, even giving your address – your location – to a bank.” He continues: “that disassociation between the address and the location is a huge help for people who are afraid for their safety.”
Fruit Cart, Warren Street by Paul Duffy (2013).
Despite the clear impact of the trial – perhaps because of the impact of the trial – Hildrey is cautious about the future of ProxyAddress. He is keenly aware of the deep and highly sensitive responsibility that comes with providing a service for vulnerable people that, after the pilot, might appear something like a silver bullet for homelessness in the UK. The reality is, of course, more complex, due to the necessarily entangled relationship between addresses and social services. Unlike a new app or business such as Deliveroo or Uber, ProxyAddress cannot simply roll out on top of pre-existing infrastructure. Instead, the system has to be closely integrated with the local authorities, which have a statutory duty to support those experiencing homelessness and will be the point of contact administering the ProxyAddress, rather than Hildrey himself. No two local councils run the same way, meaning establishing partnerships will be knotty and time-consuming. “What we don’t want to do is develop something too quickly because we’re trying to get it out there, or we get seduced by the need for coverage or attention or awards,” he says. “We can’t turn around in six months and say, ‘Actually, you can’t see a doctor in three weeks because we’ve got a bug in the system.’”[3]
Yet scale up it must. The national shame of homelessness levels in the UK cannot be overstated: research published by the homelessness charity Shelter earlier this year found that, on a given night in 2022, there will have been more than 271,000 people recorded as homeless in England (including adults and children living in hostels and other forms of temporary accommodation, as well as those sleeping on the streets). In 2021, Inside Housing reported that rough sleeping in England increased by 169 per cent between 2010, when the Conservative government took power, and 2017 when rough sleeping peaked in the UK. At the same time, government figures published in November 2022 show that there were 479,000 empty homes in England at the end of last year. ProxyAddress puts some of these homes – at least their addresses – to productive use, but with only a fraction of the impact that a real, secure home can offer.
Shadow of Self by Goska Calik (2015).
ProxyAddress is set to be rolled out across a broader group of local authorities – including in Glasgow – later this year. Given the likely effect of the cost-of-living crisis, the timing is as urgent as ever. ProxyAddress cannot prevent the causes of homelessness – this will require political change that no architect can design on their own – but it is a vital new tool in the struggle towards dignity, safety and agency for the UK’s most vulnerable.
1 The addresses are provided by local authorities, private individuals and property developers. Properties that are reliably empty – such as those under construction or undergoing long-term refurbishment – are the best to use given that they are least likely to change ownership and threaten the stability of the ProxyAddress. One ambition for the project, for example, is to see policy support for developers donating long-term empty properties as ProxyAddresses through a council tax reduction.
2 For those with the most acute needs, medical attention would likely be a priority, rather than a ProxyAddress.
3 Hildrey is deliberately withholding on the inner workings of the ProxyAddress system. This is predominantly for reasons of security (ensuring the personal details of vulnerable people cannot be accessed as a result of a cyber attack) and consistency (if parts of the system were copied and used by other well-meaning organisations, it may complicate for the end user what is currently a very simple system to navigate).
Words George Kafka
Photographs London Photo Project
This article was originally published in Disegno #35. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.